Crime in New York City

Crime rates in New York City have been recorded since at least the 1800s. The highest crime totals were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged, and then declined continuously from around 1990 throughout the present day., New York City has significantly lower rates of gun violence than many other large cities. Its 2023 homicide rate of 4.1 per 100,000 residents compares favorably to the rate in the United States as a whole and to rates in much more violent cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans .
During the 1990s, the New York City Police Department adopted CompStat, broken windows policing, and other strategies in a major effort to reduce crime. The drop in crime has been variously attributed to a number of factors, including these changes to policing, the end of the crack epidemic, the increased incarceration rate nationwide, gentrification, an aging population, and the decline of lead poisoning in children.

History

19th century

has long been associated with New York City, beginning with the Forty Thieves and the Roach Guards gangs in the Five Points area of Manhattan in the 1820s.
In 1835, the New York Herald was established by James Gordon Bennett, Sr., who helped revolutionize journalism by covering stories that appeal to the masses including crime reporting. When Helen Jewett was murdered on April 10, 1836, Bennett did innovative on-the-scene investigation and reporting and helped bring the story to national attention.
Peter Cooper, at the request of the Common Council, drew up a proposal to create a police force of 1,200 officers. The state legislature approved the proposal on May 7, 1844, and abolished the nightwatch system. Under Mayor William Havemeyer, the police force reorganized and officially established itself on May 13, 1845, as the New York Police Department. The new system divided the city into three districts and set up courts, magistrates, clerks, and station houses.

High-profile murders

Murder of Helen Jewett

was an upscale New York City prostitute whose 1836 murder, along with the subsequent trial and acquittal of her alleged killer, Richard P. Robinson, generated an unprecedented amount of media coverage.

Murder of Mary Rogers

The murder of Mary Rogers in 1841 was heavily covered by the press, which also put the spotlight on the ineptitude and corruption in the city's watchmen system of law enforcement. At the time, New York City's population of 320,000 was served by an archaic force, consisting of one night watch, one hundred city marshals, thirty-one constables, and fifty-one police officers.

Riots

1863 draft riots

The New York City draft riots in July 1863 were violent disturbances in New York City that were the culmination of working-class discontention with new laws passed by the U. S. Congress during that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil insurrection in American history aside from the Civil War itself.
President Abraham Lincoln was forced to divert several regiments of militia and volunteer troops from following up after the Battle of Gettysburg to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly working-class men, primarily ethnic Irish, resenting particularly that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared from the draft.
Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, mainly but not exclusively Irish immigrants, attacking blacks wherever they could be found. At least 11 blacks are estimated to have been killed. The conditions in the city were such that Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, stated on July 16 that, "Martial law ought to be proclaimed, but I have not a sufficient force to enforce it." The military did not reach the city until after the first day of rioting, when mobs had already ransacked or destroyed numerous public buildings, two Protestant churches, the homes of various abolitionists or sympathizers, many black homes, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, which was burned to the ground.

Other riots

In 1870, the Orange Riots were incited by Irish Protestants celebrating the Battle of the Boyne with parades through predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhoods. In the resulting police action, 63 citizens, mostly Irish, were killed.
The Tompkins Square Riot occurred on January 13, 1874, when police violently suppressed a demonstration involving thousands of people in Tompkins Square Park.

20th century

High-profile crimes include:

1900s–1950s

April 14, 1903 – The dismembered and mutilated body of Benedetto Madonia, who had last been seen the day before eating with several high-ranking figures in the Morello crime family, the city's first dominant Mafia organization, is found in an East Village barrel, the most notorious of that era's Barrel Murders. After the NYPD arrested several members of the family tied to a local counterfeiting ring. Inspector George W. McClusky, hoping to compel their cooperation through public humiliation, had officers walk them through the streets of Little Italy in handcuffs to police headquarters, a forerunner of the perp walk that has since become a common practice in the city. It backfired, as the men were hailed as heroes by the Italian immigrant community they were paraded past. Charges against all defendants were later dropped for lack of evidence, and the killing remains unsolved.
June 25, 1906 – Stanford White is shot and killed by Harry Kendall Thaw at what was then Madison Square Garden. The murder would soon be dubbed "The Crime of the Century".
June 19, 1909 – The strangled body of Elsie Sigel, granddaughter of Civil War Union general Franz Sigel, 19, is found in a trunk in the Chinatown apartment of Leon Ling, a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, ten days after she was last seen leaving her parents' apartment to visit her grandmother. Evidence found in the apartment established that Ling and Sigel had been romantically involved, and he was suspected of the killing but never arrested. No other suspects have ever been identified.
August 9, 1910 – Reformist Mayor William Jay Gaynor is shot in the throat in Hoboken, New Jersey by former city employee James Gallagher. He eventually dies in September 1913 from a heart attack.
July 4, 1914 – Lexington Avenue explosion: Four are killed and dozens injured when dynamite, believed to have been accumulated by anarchists for an attempt to blow up John D. Rockefeller's Tarrytown Kykuit mansion, goes off prematurely in a seven-story apartment building at 1626 Lexington Avenue.
June 11, 1920 – Joseph Bowne Elwell, a prominent auction bridge player, and writer, was shot in the head early in the morning in his locked Manhattan home. Despite intense media interest, the crime was never solved. The case inspired the development of the locked-room murder sub-genre of detective fiction when Ellery Queen realized that the intense public fascination with the case indicated that there was a market for fictional takes on the story.
September 16, 1920 – The Wall Street bombing kills 38 at "the precise center, geographical as well as metaphorical, of financial America and even of the financial world." Anarchists were suspected but no one was ever charged with the crime.
November 6, 1928 – Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, 46, an avid gambler best remembered for his alleged role fixing the 1919 World Series, died of gunshot wounds inflicted the day before during a Manhattan business meeting. He refused to identify his killer to police. A fellow gambler who was believed to have ordered the hit as retaliation for Rothstein's failure to pay a large debt from a recent poker game was tried and acquitted. No other suspects have ever emerged.
August 6, 1930 – The disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, an Associate Justice of the New York Supreme Court. He was last seen entering a New York City taxicab. Crater was declared legally dead in 1939. His mistress Sally Lou Ritz left New York shortly after Crater's disappearance, but was found to be with her parents in Ohio.
December 24, 1933 – Leon Tourian, 53, primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church in America, is stabbed to death by several armed men while performing Christmas Eve services. All were arrested and convicted the following summer. The killing was motivated by political divisions within the church; the ensuing schism persists.
March 19, 1935 – The arrest of a shoplifter inflames racial tensions in Harlem and escalates to rioting and looting, with three killed, 125 injured and 100 arrested.
March 28, 1937 – Veronica Gedeon, 20, a model known for posing in lurid illustrations for pulp magazines, is brutally murdered along with her mother, Mary Gedeon and a boarder, Frank Byrnes in her mother's Long Island City home. Sculptor Robert George Irwin, who left a telltale soap sculpture at the scene, was eventually arrested after a nationwide manhunt fed by widespread media coverage of the case, said to be the most intense since the Stanford White murder, which capitalized by Gedeon's risque professional work. After doubts about his sanity surfaced during trial, he was sentenced to life in prison.
July 4, 1940 – Two police detectives are killed, and other officers injured, when a bomb detonated as they were carrying it out of the World's Fair from the British Pavilion. No arrests were made and the case remains open; investigators today believe it may have been planted by British intelligence as a false flag operation to implicate the German-American Bund and draw the U.S. into World War II, which was not going well for Britain at the time.
November 16, 1940 – "Mad Bomber" George Metesky plants the first bomb of his 16-year campaign of public bombings.
January 11, 1943 – Carlo Tresca, an Italian American labor leader who led the opposition to Fascism, Stalinism and Mafia control of unions, was shot dead at a Manhattan intersection during the night. Given the enemies he had made and their propensity for violence, the list of potential suspects was long; however, the investigation was incomplete and no one was ever officially named. Historians believe the most likely suspect was mobster Carmine Galante, later acting boss of the Bonanno family, seen fleeing the scene, who had likely acted on the orders of a Bonanno underboss and Fascist sympathizer Tresca had threatened to expose.
August 1, 1943 – A race riot erupts in Harlem after a black soldier is shot by the police and rumored to be dead. The incident touches off a simmering brew of racial tension, unemployment, and high prices to a day of rioting and looting. Several looters are shot dead, about 500 people are injured, and another 500 arrested.
March 8, 1952 – A month after helping police find bank robber Willie Sutton, 24-year-old clothing salesman Arnold Schuster is fatally shot outside his Brooklyn home. An extensive investigation failed to identify any suspects, though police came to believe that either the Gambino crime family or Sutton's associates had ordered Schuster killed. Schuster's family filed a lawsuit against the city, which led to a landmark ruling by the New York Court of Appeals that the government has a duty to protect anyone who cooperates with the police when asked to do so.
October 25, 1957 — Mafia boss Albert Anastasia was shot dead while getting a shave at a Manhattan barbershop. As with many organized-crime killings, it remains officially unsolved.
August 29, 1959 — Salvador Agron, 16, Puerto Rican gang member who murdered Anthony Krzesinski and Robert Young, Jr., two teenagers. He mistook them for members of a gang called the Norsemen who were supposed to show up for a gang fight. Agron was the subject of the musical The Capeman by Paul Simon.